Oren and Solomon: Duelfer 5 Years Later: Words of Mass Distraction

Five years ago, Charles Duelfer, Head of the Iraq Survey Group, presented to Congress the final report of his 1200 member team, which concluded that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction when it was invaded by the United States in 2003. Because the danger posed by WMD was the Bush Administration’s chief justification for the Iraq war, the failure to discover the illicit arms provoked a fiery political scandal. The ensuing debate revolved around the following question: did the Bush Administration intentionally distort the truth about Iraq’s WMD, as the administration’s harsh critics charged, or did the WMD fiasco result from an unintentional if grave “intelligence failure,” as the administration’s more moderate critics would have it? Alas, the debate sidestepped another equally important question: what role did the use of the phrase “weapons of mass destruction”—a phrase that few Americans were familiar with prior to 2002—play in the successful marketing of the war to the American people? Did this ominous phrase merely describe an Iraqi threat or did its incantation rather create and magnify the threat?

Consider the following excerpt from a speech delivered by President Bush in Fort Hood, Texas, on January 3, 2003:

“The Iraqi regime has used weapons of mass destruction. They not only had weapons of mass destruction, they used weapons of mass destruction. They used weapons of mass destruction in other countries, they have used weapons of mass destruction on their own people. That’s why I say Iraq is a threat, a real threat.”

This statement illustrates two key features of the way in which “weapons of mass destruction” was used to mobilize public support for the Iraq war.

First, note that the specific weapon the Iraqi regime actually used “in other countries” (Iran) and “on their own people” was poison gas; yet the president employed the more abstract term WMD—an expression that in the public’s mind was commonly associated with that ultimate weapon of terror: the nuclear bomb. Although the president’s usage of the term to allude to chemical weapons was technically in accord with a definition of WMD adopted by the United Nations in 1948 (WMD = atomic, chemical, biological, and radiological weapons), it was largely inconsistent with the typical usage of this phrase—to the extent that it has been used at all—by the American media. From the 1950s to the 1980s the media used “WMD” rather infrequently; on those occasions in which it has appeared in the press, the phrase has only rarely been associated with weapons other than nuclear arms. Neither the poison gas employed by the Egyptian army in Yemen in the 1960s nor the “Agent Orange” widely used by the United States in Vietnam was depicted as “weapons of mass destruction.” Most significantly, in contrast to the Bush Administration’s rhetoric in 2002–03, in the 1980s the American press did not employ the term WMD in its reporting on Iraq’s chemical warfare against Iran and the Kurds. Although the frequency of “weapons of mass destruction” in the press rose somewhat after the phrase was inserted into the 1991 UN resolution that established the weapons’ inspection regime in Iraq, familiarity with this term remained largely confined to specialists. Only during the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq did this expression become a household phrase.

Because chemical weapons are nowhere nearly as destructive as nuclear arms (which Iraq never had or used), and because the American public, to the extent that it heard the phrase “weapons of mass destruction” before 2002, typically associated it with nuclear arms, the administration’s frequent declarations that Iraq had, or used, “weapons of mass destruction” rhetorically magnified the Iraqi threat.

The second feature of the rhetoric of WMD illustrated by the president’s Fort Hood speech was its repetitiousness. Beginning with the January 2002 State of the Union address, the president and senior administration officials uttered this term multiple times in most of their public appearances. The U.S. media echoed and amplified the administration’s WMD rhetoric—in the twelve months preceding the war, the frequency of the term’s appearance in the press had increased almost tenfold. Even the acronym WMD has become so ubiquitous that by the time the war broke out many journalists no longer felt compelled to spell it out. The American Dialect Society selected “weapons of mass destruction” as its 2002 “word of the year.”

The incessant incantation of “weapons of mass destruction” by the Bush Administration and the ricocheting of this phrase through the echo chamber of the mass media emptied it of any specific meaning. Just as the repetitive structure of many liturgical texts serves to divert the worshipper’s mind from his worldly situation and to affirm the axioms of his belief, so did the ceaseless incantation of “weapons of mass destruction” make Americans take the existence of these weapons as an article of faith, distracting the American mind from the realities of the Middle East. And just as the chanting of a mantra lifts the chanter above material reality and promotes the actualization of the idea being uttered, so did the chant “weapons of mass destruction” create the Iraqi threat as much as it described such a threat.